Graphene Optical Lens a Billionth of a Meter Thick Breaks the Diffraction Limit

[Sabre]

Slashdot

With the development of photonic chips and nano-optics, the old ground glass lenses can't keep up in the race toward miniaturization. In the search for a suitable replacement, a team from the Swinburne University of Technology has developed a graphene microlens one billionth of a meter thick that can take sharper images of objects the size of a single bacterium and opens the door to improved mobile phones, nanosatellites, and computers.

According to the team, the new lens is flexible, can resolve objects as small as 200 nanometers, and can even see into the near infrared. This is possible a it breaks the diffraction limit and allows a focus of less than half the wavelength of light.

Once the technology is mature, the team sees it as having applications beyond microscopy, such as in lighter, thinner mobile phones with thermal imaging capabilities, smaller endoscopes for surgery, as a replacement for conventional lenses in nanosatellites to save a couple of hundred grams of launch weight, and to increase the efficiency of photonic chips in supercomputers and superfast broadband distribution.

I thought the diffraction limit was akin to the conservation of energy: Never to be broken. Very interesting news.


(elzorro ninja edit)

[ElZorro]

I was reading the source article earlier... (http://www.swinburne.edu.au/news/latest ... esults.php) Its crazy stuff. Even if they can build it (this group has a history of introducing crazy stuff that can't be built, but thats what theoretical physicists think is fun) its going to be years, this technique works well for super small elements but its going to be huge amounts of work to scale it up.

[zaxrex]

Next up: assembling huge array of space lenses to continuously focus light from the sun on a single point on rotating Earth. 15 hrs of sunlight in the winter!
Actually, if they are so light, would make sense to print lenses in space to focus light on solar cells to increase their efficiency.

[ElZorro]

Microlensing on solar cells has been tried, was expensive, but I think you're on to something, being able to print (or maybe better, subtract) could really drive the cost down.

[Sabre]

From what I understand, the problem isn't getting light in to solar cells (or concentrating it), but extracting energy from more than a wave length or two is the real problem. I'm not in that business though, so I could be wrong